From the opening licks on Grand Mal's Bad Timing, you know you're in for a raucous treat. A honky-tonk swagger pervades the air as the guitars begin to pound away. It slips into groovin' rock tune and then Bill Whitten begins singing in a gravely sneer: "It was a first round knockout / She was a beauty school dropout / Sprung forth from the fat of the land."
For the most part, Bad Timing is a good thing. Grand Mal is a combination of Cheap Trick, MC5, Action Figures, and The Rolling Stones (Exile and Some Girls era) with The Black Crowes and The Kinks as the backing bands. These guys like to drink whiskey, smoke cigarettes, and close bars down. Not necessarily in that order. They have dirty hair and wear dark sunglasses they glare at you through. They like their rock and roll loud.
The whole album has a cohesive feel, without all the songs sounding exactly the same. The tunes move along quickly and make you want to wear a leather jacket and jeans and smoke. Sneering is important when you sing along, and an air guitar just feels right. And the lyrics from Whitten should be bronzed and sent to rock heaven.
From "1st Round K.O." with its beautiful changes around the chorus to "Old Fashioned," a white trash romp with a wall of distorted guitar ("I'm in love with the trashman / 'cos he's so old fashioned / a pack of smokes rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve / and he looks like Rock Action / Like a space/time contraction / Back to the year of our lord, 1973") to "Disaster Film," which I can't seem to get enough of. Starting with piano and a subdued electrified vocal, the song is moody and sparse, until they decide to crank it up a bit. This is their anthem.
"I just got back from out west, a funeral for a friend / The man's despair was contagious / If he heard me singing this song / he'd call me a traitor…Baby, run for your life, you know my friends are gonna eat you alive / They're out of their minds on pills, their lives are like disaster films / They're never gonna win no Nobel prizes … Well, it's four in the morning but of course come on in / Well here's my beer and tobacco / Don't burn my house down, don't OD in my bathroom."
The first time I had heard of these guys was on Arena Rock's This Is Next Year, where they performed "Hey Man." That song blew me away, and I can say the same about Bad Timing. It is catchy, run-down, real, bluesy, guitar-laden rock with lyrics you want to sing along with. Some songs come at your full force, and others creep up on you with a slow build. Either way, in today's world of music, their timing couldn't have been better.